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The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow that Changed the Course of WWII
September 18, 2007,
Simon & Schuster
2007
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
One of the Best Books of 2007 according to The Washington Post
"...a new and beautifully researched account of what had been been a poorly understood part of the war." - Anne Applebaum,
The New York Review of Books
“Nagorski is definitely a devotee, and his new book is a landmark in studies of Russia precisely because it skillfully unwraps myths, martyrs and demons.” - Constantine Pleshakov, Washington Post Book World
“Enthralling history” - Ned Crabb, Wall Street Journal
The battle for Moscow was the biggest battle of World War II—the biggest battle of all time. And yet it is far less known than Stalingrad, which involved about half the number of troops. From the time Hitler launched his assault on Moscow on September 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942, seven million troops were engaged in this titanic struggle. The combined losses of both sides—those killed, taken prisoner or severely wounded—were 2.5 million, of which nearly 2 million were on the Soviet side. But the Soviet capital narrowly survived, and for the first time the German Blitzkrieg ended in failure. This shattered Hitler’s dream of a swift victory over the Soviet Union and radically changed the course of the war.
The full story of this epic battle has never been told because it undermines the sanitized Soviet accounts of the war that portray Stalin as a military genius and his people as heroically united against the German invader. Stalin’s blunders, incompetence and brutality made it possible for German troops to approach the outskirts of Moscow. This triggered panic in the city—with looting, strikes and outbreaks of previously unimaginable violence. About half the city’s population fled. But Hitler’s blunders would soon loom even larger: sending his troops to attack the Soviet Union without winter uniforms, insisting on an immediate German reign of terror, and refusing to heed his generals’ pleas that he allow them to attack Moscow as quickly as possible. In the end, Hitler’s mistakes trumped Stalin’s mistakes.
Based on recently declassified documents from Soviet archives, including the files of the dreaded NKVD, the accounts of survivors and the children of top Soviet military and government officials, and the reports of Western diplomats and correspondents, The Greatest Battle finally illuminates the full story of a battle between two systems based on sheer terror and relentless slaughter.
Even as Moscow’s fate hung in the balance, the United States and Britain were discovering how wily a partner Stalin would turn out to be in the fight against Hitler—and how eager he was to push his demands for a postwar empire in Eastern Europe. In addition to chronicling the bloodshed, Andrew Nagorski takes the reader behind the scenes of the early negotiations between Hitler and Stalin, and then between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill.
This is a remarkable addition to the history of World War II.
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Back Cover Quotes:
“The massive, bloody battle of Moscow, though less well known than Stalingrad and Kursk, altered the course of World War II. This riveting account ranges from the front lines to meetings between Stalin and his generals, and between Hitler and his, to the international diplomacy of the war. Drawing on revealing declassified documents and dramatic interviews with survivors, Nagorski provides the epic battle with the book it deserves.”
--William Taubman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
“This highly readable, intellectually stimulating—and at the same time very moving—record of the fearful experiences of nations and individuals stands out as one of our time’s finest war books. Not only the mass dying, but also the profound self-deceits of Hitler, of Stalin—and of high-level Westerners—are brought together in this large-scale horror epic.”
--Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror
“A truly gripping account of arguably the most decisive and yet one of the least well-known great European battles of World War II—written with a genuine feel for the individual dimensions of warfare and compassion for the suffering of both the victors and the vanquished.”
--Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of Second Chance
“Andrew Nagorski has written a gripping story of a strangely under-appreciated event that profoundly shaped our world. Nagorski’s morally acute, forceful, grimly enlightening account, enriched by interviews with surviving participants, is an urgent reminder of the totalitarian nightmare from which we in the blessed West only narrowly escaped.”
--Richard Bernstein, former Berlin bureau chief of the New York Times and author of
Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French
“With his dogged reporting, Nagorski has delivered a gripping account of warfare at its cruelest and rawest.”
--Max Boot, senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations and author of War Made New:
Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today